Ali Alizadeh

Iran, War, Displacement and my choice of Joan of Arc

This paper discusses the personal perceptions that have shaped
my poetics in writing La Pucelle: an Epic of Joan of Arc as part
of a PhD candidature in the School of Communication and Creative Arts,
Deakin University.

The French Woman who Fought the English

My first perception of Joan of Arc was formed around an image on the
window of a derelict bookshop. I was four or five; holding my mother's
hand, browsing the numerous stationery-outlets scattered along the streets
in Teheran's university district.

It was in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. The prospect
of a democratic left-leaning government in Iran had been abolished, the
veil had been reintroduced and the tensions with Iraq were about to reach
their inevitable climax. The grown-ups, as I remember, were either anxious
about the vibes of war and religious fundamentalism, or adamant to protect
themselves and their families against what they hoped to be only an intermittent
period of right-wing fanaticism.

I was at the age of being sent to kindergarten and my mother, a maths
teacher, was making sure that I was thoroughly prepared for my education.
She believed that - in a country traumatised by the conflicts between
East and West, in a nation where the most regressive traditions (such
as the veil) were being dragged out of the cultural closet for spruiking
patriotism and militarism - the only chance a child had of remaining sane
and civilised was through receiving a comprehensive education. I therefore
had my hand in hers, shopping for notepads, coloured pencils, clothes
and a school bag near the University of Tehran.

It was there, in the midst of the city's notorious traffic and pollution,
that I was introduced to her or, more precisely, to a depiction
of her.

Being a little boy preoccupied with comic-book heroes, action figures
and toy soldiers, I was instantly entranced by the simple yet vivid painting
of a mounted Medieval knight on the window of an abandoned shop. The image,
obviously the shop's emblem, was a comic-book style armoured figure on
a white horse, upholding a large flag in a theatrically triumphant pose.

The image was distinctly European; the knight wore no helmet and had
long, wavy blond hair.

When I asked my mother about it she paused and looked for the signs of
the deserted shop's identity before remembering: 'It must be Joan of
Arc. This must be the French bookshop. Yes, this is the Joan of Arc Bookshop.'
I asked her who this Joan of Arc was. She curtly answered: 'A French
woman who fought the English', before yanking my hand and hurling
me into an overcrowded clothes store.

This bookstore, as I learnt later, was one of the outposts of French
cultural imperialism and/or cultural exchange in Iran. It had been quickly
evacuated at the time of the Islamist victory when the numerous Western
residents in Iran had felt the heat of the Ayatollah's fierce anti-Western
diatribes. New Iranian owners later revived the bookstore but by then
the site's political and historical meanings had long vanished. I returned
there years later; by then the heroic image on the window had been erased.

What the new regime could not totally obliterate, however, were the books
that had been published before the Revolution and the encyclopaedias written
in or translated into Persian from dominantly European sources. Sometime
during my first year of primary school, to my great joy, I found an entry
about Joan of Arc in one of my father's encyclopaedias. Although I can't
remember the exact passage, I can recall the page layout and my reaction
upon reading the paragraph-long biography of the 'French woman who fought
the English'.

I was exhilarated by Joan of Arc's achievements and horrified by her
demise. The prospect of a teenage girl leading an army and defeating a
powerful enemy excited me greatly, but the image of the same girl being
burnt at the stake only two years after her famous deeds distressed me.

In retrospect, I think it was out of the strong ambivalence of these
opposing emotions that my life-long interest in this historical figure,
and in history in general, developed. Even now, after having extensively
researched the records of Joan's life, having travelled to the sites of
her story and having written about her at length, I can't 'make up my
mind', that is, reduce my sentiments about this subject to a singular
feeling. I find her heroic and pitiful at the same time; brilliant and
gloomy, a source for inspiration as well as disappointment.

A Contradictory Character

As I'd realise later, continuing contradiction is not only apparent in
the perceived narrative of Joan of Arc's life, but also intrinsic in the
records of her personality, her politics and spirituality, and her political
and cultural significations. Even on the most immediate and picturesque
levels paradoxical characteristics are striking; she was a woman in knight's
armour, a peasant who crowned a king, a mystic who was burnt as a heretic,
an illiterate adolescent who commanded an army, an iconoclast who changed
the course of her nation's history, etc. As Mary Gordon has observed,
Joan 'bursts out of categories, crisscrosses our ideas about her, contradicts
the images she has presented about herself' (Gordon
2000: 25).

Beyond these images, we may approach her as conundrum on a more historical
and informed level. For example, her use of language, as recorded in the
transcripts of the Trials of Condemnation (1431) and quoted in the testimonies
of the Trials of Rehabilitation (1455-56) are a vivid source of vacillation
and unsettlement. As Karen Sullivan has noted:

Her speech, like her character, contained within it elements from various
populations, both aristocratic and plebeian, both masculine and feminine,
and both sacred and secular, but in its combination of all of these elements
it remained anomalous to all of them. (Sullivan
1999: xxiii)

An example of this could be Joan of Arc's often overlooked words spoken
to the clerics in the Rouen prison cell during the morning of her execution
on 30 May 1431:

It was I who brought the message of the crown to my King. I was the angel
and there was no other. And the crown was no more than the promise of
my King's coronation, which I made to him. (Of Arc 2000: 143)

Here, an emotionally-charged Joan is either making a confession or further
defending her innocence. (The passage is based on accounts by three eyewitnesses
whose recollections don't make the import of her words clear.) She does,
however, seem to decipher her earlier cryptic descriptions of 'the sign'
that was supposed to have convinced the Dauphin Charles of Valois to accept
her 'message' - i.e. place her at the head of his reinforcement armies
- upon their meeting and discussions in the Chateau de Chinon during late
February to early March 1429.

By calling Charles her King, Joan subscribes to the codes of medieval
fealty which meant even though Charles was technically a Crown Prince
at the time of the meeting, he was, by his regal blood, Joan's liege;
her King. However, Joan instantly positions herself above him by
describing the coronation that legitimised the Dauphin's title as King
Charles VII as her own making; portraying herself as one with the
power to make kings and hence denoting the Dauphin as her actual subject.

More paradoxical in her above statement, however, is the interplay between
the sacred/secular binaries of the words 'angel' and 'crown'. Here Joan
seems to refute the mystical overtones of her earlier statements in which
she had described the crown as an actual object. She now says that it
was a metaphor for the 'promise of the coronation'. She also repudiates
that an external supernatural agent -an angel - had brought the either
corporeal or metaphorical crown to Charles; by saying that it was delivered
by the speaker herself. Yet all of these negations are themselves negated
when Joan says that she herself was the angel (note the tense:
she is not an angel at the time of making this admission; she had, it
seems, momentarily become an angel at the time of 'bringing the
crown'). This indicates that, indeed, external supernatural agencies were
at work, elevating the speaker into the metaphysical state of a heavenly
messenger. As Sullivan notes of this passage, the words embody an ideological
dilemma:

Joan portrayed herself both as a human being, unrecognised by the clerics
who insisted upon signs of her divine affliction and in need of heavenly
assistance, and as an angel, commanding recognition and providing that
heavenly assistance. She portrayed herself both as the thing signified
by the sign and as the sign that signified that thing. (Sullivan 1999:
75)

Joan's physical appearance further demonstrates her contradictions. She
was, on one hand, in the words of her squire Jean d'Aulon, 'a young girl,
beautiful and shapely' (Meltzer 2001:
5-6) but, in the words of the same squire, she never moved her soldiers
'to any desire or carnal feelings' (Warner 1991: 17).

Although the latter statement doesn't seem totally accurate - I've found
at least two accounts of soldiers making sexual advances during her campaigns
and evidence of rape and/or attempts at rape by the English guards during
her imprisonment - it can be observed that the sexual tendencies of most
of her soldiers (a large number of them being brigands and mercenaries,
renowned for their predatory sexual habits) were nullified in Joan's presence
despite her youth and beauty. Marguerite de Touroulde, widow of the Dauphin's
counsellor Regnier de Boulingy, at whose house in Bourges Joan stayed
during the preparation of the Orleans campaign, has made a similar observation
based on a conversation with the knights who had escorted Joan during
her journey to the Dauphin's castle:

[The knights] said that in the beginning they wanted to require [Joan]
to lie with them carnally. But when the moment came to speak to her of
this they were so much ashamed that they dared not speak of it to her
nor say a word of it. (Pernoud 1964:
44)

The confusions caused by Joan of Arc's physical appearance have noticeably
overwhelmed a number of writers and commentators. Opting for a simplified
'ugly duckling' gender stereotype and totally ignoring the testimonies
to Joan's beauty, Thomas Kenneally's novel Blood Red, Sister Rose
(1974) depicts her as an exceptionally and conveniently ugly girl whose
physical problems - not only ugliness, but also something being 'wrong
with her womb' (Kenneally 1984: 40)
- compel her to 'give up' on being a woman and pursue life as a man instead.
Even the feminist Vita Sackville-West was not able to cope with the paradox
of Joan's sexual appeal and decided to distort the facts to justify her
perception. She concluded that because '[m]en attempted no rape [which,
according to the records and testimonies, they did] nor women were jealous it
is fair to qualify [Joan] as unattractive' (Sackville-West
1990: 6). As Francoise Meltez has noted, this 'unperturbed conclusion'
is based on gender clichés that assume an attractive woman could
naturally provoke sexual violence, mistrust and jealousy (Meltez
2001: 5).

Sackville-West's view demonstrates the difficulties in dealing with the
complexities of Joan of Arc. As Marina Warner puts it, Joan simultaneously
presents two very different images:

On the one hand, Joan is all woman, seductive, even beautiful, with all
the full complements of sexual characteristics; on the other, she annuls
the usual consequences of those characteristics, remaining in the virginal
state of pre-pubescence. (Warner 1991: 19)

Joan of Arc's virginity was tested and verified on two occasions - upon
arrival at the Dauphin's court in 1429 and during her trials in 1431 -
and plays an important part in the formulation of her identity. She titled
herself Jeanne la Pucelle (Joan the Maid) when she entered the
public sphere, and her maidenhood remained a given in all of her future
representations including Voltaire's controversial eighteenth-century
mock-epic La Pucelle, which dismisses almost every other aspect
of her myth with crude, lively and unapologetic satire. Yet, although
the reality of Joan's chastity has never been questioned, its essence
is deeply ambiguous and, like every other aspect of this complex historical
figure, embodies quite opposing signifiers.

On the one hand, for the religious mainstream, virginity during the Middle
Ages was the sign of highest moral purity and devotion, in likeness to
the virtue of the Virgin Mary. It provided Joan and her party with a saintly
halo - politically required for her quest in winning public support from
the religious populace, the clergy and the papacy for a difficult war
against the Anglo-Burgundian enemies of the Dauphin.

In this sense, the hymen moves beyond being a part of the female anatomy
and becomes, as Jacques Derrida has noted, a metaphor 'with no life of
its own, no proper name' (Meltzer 2001: 104). In the case of Joan of Arc,
it becomes a metaphor for her sacredness and the sacredness of her military
cause; even a Miracle because, in the body of the demonically sinful medieval
woman, an abstention from intercourse was largely perceived as an act
of divine intervention. After all, Joan herself has stated that her decision
to remain celibate was, at least in part, an attempt in securing God's
satisfaction:

The first time I heard the voice, I promised to keep my virginity for
as long as it should please God. (Pernoud 1964: 26)

I won't delve into the single most controversial area of Johannic studies
(the 'voice') for the time being nor will I differentiate between 'being
asked to promise' and 'promising voluntarily'. The above admission - made
hesitantly upon being intimidated by the Inquisition - may, at any rate,
indicate Joan's virginity as a recognition and reinforcement of the socially
desirable gender stereotypes of a conservative Christian girlhood; acting
in accordance with God's pleasure, further accepting the moral hegemony
of Christianity over sexual habits and discourses, remaining a virgin
until marriage, etc.

On the other hand, however, we must take into account the fact that Joan
of Arc vehemently rejected marriage. In 1428 at the age of 16 and before
leaving her family for war and politics, Joan was called before the Court
of Toul to respond to a charge of breaching the promise of marriage. She
travelled to Toul alone; a journey which, according to Anatole France,
'involved more than twenty leagues on foot, over roads infested with bands
of armed men, through a country laid waste by fire and sword' (France
1925: 62). In the Court Joan denied that such a promise had ever been
made and was subsequently acquitted. She later recalled:

I swore before the judge to speak the truth and in the end he roundly
said that I had made the man no promise whatsoever. (Pernoud 1964: 25)

Although the identity of 'the man' is not known, such a suit, as Edward
Lucie-Smith has noted, 'can only have originated on the part of her parents
to marry her off. And the point is that Joan resisted'
(Lucie-Smith 2000: 25). This important point has often
been brushed over in the particularly Christian versions of Joan of Arc's
life. In Pamela Mercantel's 1997 novel An Army of Angels, for example,
the Catholic author has noticeably dismissed this episode in her fictional
account:

The long, exhausting walk and the resulting legal procedure would thankfully
blur in [Joan's] memory and become just an unpleasant matter that was
soon finished. (Marcantel 1997: 50)

As seen in Joan's statement, however, this incident did not 'blur' in
her memory and was recalled three years later during the Trials. Importantly,
however, this episode hints at the private aspects of Joan of Arc's very
public virginity (regardless of the ambiguous attributes of 'the voice'
to which the promise of keeping virginity was made in the first place)
and, as I'll presently demonstrate, it contradicts the conservative significations
of her 'pure' chaste body.

It should be kept in mind that, generally speaking, marriage among the
medieval peasantry was an economic contract rather than the romantic bond
depicted in the era's courtly literature. In an oppressively patriarchal
society stricken by war and poverty, it seems to have been to a young
woman's very real financial and social advantage to accept a marriage
proposal since only a married woman could be provided with property, fiscal
entitlements and so on. In Joan's particular case, also, resistance against
the Toul marriage proposal would have infuriated her parents who had,
it seems, devised the scheme to 'marry her off'. It is worth mentioning
here that Joan's father, Jacque Darc, had told her brothers to drown her
in the Meuse River should she disobey the family and that, if they failed
to do so, he would drown his disobedient daughter himself (Pernoud 1964:
25-6).

Without having ever 'officially' taken a vow of celibacy - in the presence
of clergy - Joan seems vigilantly committed to remaining single and/or
virginal. The level of her commitment is demonstrated by the risks undertaken
in this episode - legally, financially and, considering her father's reported
threats, vitally - as well as the courage and tenacity displayed in undertaking
a difficult journey and appearing alone before a potentially hostile,
male judiciary. This observation supports Andrea Dworkin's view of Joan
of Arc's chastity:

Her virginity was a self-conscious and militant repudiation
of the common lot of the female with its intrinsic low status Joan
wanted to be virtuous in the old sense of the word, before the Christians
got hold of it: virtuous meant brave, valiant. (Dworkin
1997: 85)

In other words, her virginity seems to have been a personal repudiation
of the same Christian value system and institutions - such as marriage,
family, etc - that it appeared to publicly support. On a personal level,
Joan's virginity, as Dworkin further observes, is not a socially acceptable
Virtue belonging to organisations such as the Church but 'a rebel virginity
harmonious with the deepest values of resistance to any political despotism'
(Dworkin 1997: 94). Paradoxically, this 'resistance' has been reinterpreted
as a sign of conformity to the Christian married/single paradigms it was
likely intended to undermine.

This paradox is not only a case of an individual's passions being exploited
and perverted by public obsession - although it certainly is that
- but also a further demonstration of contradictions that characterise
the life of Joan of Arc. She sees herself as the Dauphin's subject and
yet subjects him to her own visions; she believes her quest is secular
but actualised through the sacred; she is beautiful yet her beauty blocks
the beholder's gaze; she is a virgin for God but her virginity is a resistance
against the traditions of Christianity. As Barbara Tuchman has noted,
Joan of Arc:

belongs to no category. Perhaps [she] can only be explained as the answer
called forth by an exigent historic need. The moment required her and
she rose. (Tuchman 1979: 588)

This urgent need was that of an expired era thirsty for renewal; the
Middle Ages anticipating the Renaissance and, perhaps, Modernity. More
precisely, it was the demand of a defeated and devastated people in need
of an end to one of history's longest and most brutal conflicts, the Hundred
Years War.

Unlawful Women

Of course, I wasn't aware of the full complexities of Joan of Arc's story
at the time of discovering her in Iran of the early 80s. I was an impressionable
boy who had been touched by the electricity of her tale; as yet unstruck
by the full jolt of her thunderbolt. However, as years went on and Iran
disintegrated through the calamities of war with Iraq, UN economic sanctions,
home grown extremism, mass-scale capital punishments, unemployment, etc,
my interest in the unusual medieval French heroine persevered and developed
into a strong sense of affinity.

Sometime in the mid to late 80s I found an unexpected parallel between
the public punishments of Iranian women who wore 'indecent' clothes and
the execution of Joan of Arc. Despite being very young and almost totally
ignorant of gender issues and the machinations of misogyny, I noted that
the first charge made against Joan by the Inquisition of Rouen on 14 July
1430 was very similar to the accusations directed at the 'un-Islamic'
Iranian women by the Islamist authorities:

wholly forgetful of womanly honesty, and having thrown off the bonds
of shame, careless of all the modesty of womankind, [the accused has worn]
with an astonishing and monstrous brazenness, immodest garments belonging
to male sex. (Barret 1931: 19)

In a further public statement, the French court explained why such a
deviation was a crime punishable by death:

putting off the habit and dress of the female sex [for a woman] is contrary
to divine law, abominable to God, condemned and prohibited by every law.
(Barret 1931: 31)

This view was not simply that of a bribed and hostile judiciary attempting
to mask the ulterior-motives for trying, and eventually executing, a dangerous
political adversary. A dislike verging on hatred for women who crossed
the gender-divides and contradicted the socially determined norms in medieval
Europe seems to have been as widespread then as it is in today's fundamentalist
right-wing cultures. In a treatise on Joan's choice of clothes and 'masculine'
profession (written at some time between 1431 and 1438) the renowned German
cleric Johann Nidar concluded: 'I cannot sufficiently marvel how the frail
sex can rush to such presumptuous things' (Coulton
1967: 213). Joan's 'presumption' was not only a rejection of the era's
sexism but a form of heresy according to the Scripture. As is said in
Deuteronomy 22:5:

Women are not to wear men's clothing, and men are not to wear women's
clothing; the Lord your God hates people who do such things
(United Bible Societies 1987: 192).

In the Iran of my lifetime, also, a rigid adherence to Scripture (Koran)
justified and fuelled the oppression and punishment of the more 'presumptuous'
members of the 'frail sex'. Showing hair publicly was something that men
did, and if a woman dared to let a few strands slip past the fringes of
her hejab scarf she would be arrested by the basiji guards
and driven away in a Nissan Patrol to either a prison or a public space
where she would be bashed or flogged. The basijis were the militant
arm of the State and a force above either the police or the army; they
were the implementers of the shariats ('laws' deduced from Koran's
psalms). They were equivalent to the Church Militant - or secular arm
- of Joan of Arc's era which carried out her public burning in Rouen's
market square.

In the Iran of my childhood, after each public flogging or stoning, the
excited audience was further aroused by a mullah's Islamic prayer chants:
Allah-o Akbar (Allah is Great) and La Allah-a ella Allah (There's
no God but Allah). Audience and participants alike would repeat the
Arabic words after the mullah until a moment of communal redemption was
reached. The punished (assuming he/she hadn't been killed during the sadistic
ceremony) would cry in shame and the perpetrators of torture would raise
their hands skywards and shout the Scriptural slogans in appreciation
of God's bloody benevolence. These scenes could have been lifted straight
out of the Middle Ages. As Johan Huizinga has noted of witch burnings
of the late-Medieval Europe:

The gruesome fascination and coarse compassion stirred at the place of
execution became an important element in the spiritual nourishment for
the people. (Huizinga 1996: 3)

I do not mean to imply that Iran is five hundred years 'behind' France.
What I mean to indicate is that wars of invasion, and the resultant patriotic
and/or ideological fanaticism among the invaded people, whenever they
occur, can produce similar outcomes; War's Companions being misogyny,
xenophobia, cruelty, poverty, etc.

Furthermore, there are a number of specific similarities between the
Iran of my lifetime and the France of Joan of Arc's. Both countries had
enjoyed a period of prosperity and economic and cultural growth immediately
before being invaded by an aggressive neighbour's armies. In 1975 Iran
had been named the 'Japan of the Middle East', while France, before the
particularly gruesome third phase of the Hundred Years War (out of which
Joan of Arc rose), had been nicknamed Belle France - Beautiful France.
Both countries had then become the scorched battlegrounds of the forces
of militarily superior, impending 'New World Orders': English Imperialism
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; Saddam's US-backed invasion
of oil fields of the Middle East during my lifetime.

The Great Misery

But a more thorough and less subjective discussion of the Hundred Years
War is needed here. This particular historic situation was, as Tuchman
has noted, the 'exigent need' that prompted the manifestation of Joan
of Arc as a phenomenon. As Warner has also noted, the war provided 'the
conditions of disruption necessary for the emergence of a saviour' (Warner
1991: 33).

One way of looking at these conditions is to focus on the political:
the violent tensions between the country's two most powerful duchies -
Burgundy and Orleans; and the international war waged over the French
throne left vacant due to King Charles VI's severe mental illness. This
perspective primarily sees the conditions of disturbance in terms of the
Anglo-Burgundian invasion of northern France and the Valois-Orleanist
resistance in the south. We could undertake further analysis by looking
at the roots of the hostility between the royal houses of France and England
and by depicting either the arrogance of Philippe VI of Valois or the
belligerence of Edward III of Plantagenet as the catalyst for the English
invasion of 1337. Other correlating factors also come into play: the Great
Schism, the farmers' rebellions, the Black Death, the Anglo-Scottish wars
and the threat of an Ottoman invasion of Europe. All told, it is an eventful
political world that contextualizes the tale of Joan of Arc.

Unlike the nobles who participated in the battles and quarrelled during
the signing of treaties, however, Joan had no hereditary interest in the
war. She belonged to a self-determined farming community in a remote northeastern
region that remained, for most parts, ambivalent towards the warring factions.
The Meuse Valley, where Joan was born, nurtured both pro-Burgundian and
pro-Valois sentiments. Some of its occupants paid protection taxes to
the garrisons of the pro-French Vaucouleurs while others seem to have
accepted the protection offered by the dukes of Barr and Burgundy. As
Joan herself recalled during her trials, while her own village of Domremy
was predominantly Orleanist, the nearby village of Maxey was Burgundian
in allegiance. This political demarcation, however, did not prevent the
villagers from cohabiting the Valley; according to Joan the children of
the different villages often played together, even though at times their
games turned into fights (Pernoud 1964: 21).

In other words, it is very unlikely that the factional tensions that
fuelled and characterised the Hundred Years War in central and western
France could have exerted much direct influence over the formative experiences,
personality and passions of Joan of Arc. Seeing Joan in the context of
a patriotic struggle against a foreign invasion would be equally inappropriate
since 'national identity' and patriotism as either populist or elitist
agendas did not exist during the late-Middle Ages. Joan's particular region
- Lorraine - was not even considered to be a part of France and was not
governed by the French Crown until 1634 - 200 years after Joan. Although
in both left-wing and right-wing mythologies Joan has been depicted as
a nationalist, these future images are devoid of historical reality; Joan
of Arc was as much a French Nationalist as Julius Caesar was a Roman Catholic
or Napoleon a Neo-Liberal Globalist.

Joan of Arc was motivated by neither an allegiance to the House of Valois
nor a zeal for a non-existent 'fatherland'. The fact that she was a young
woman from a relatively apolitical commoners' class (peasantry) indicates
that her wholehearted involvement in the war against the English must
have been stirred by reasons other than feudal fealty, political rivalry,
factional opposition, etc. Also, while it is true that some farmers joined
the wars of the late-Middle Ages for professional reasons - as mercenaries,
'free companies' and camp followers - it is clear that Joan's participation
was of a totally different nature. Notwithstanding that she did not remotely
resemble an army tramp or a mercenary, it is true to say that she did
not join the Dauphin's armies but, from the very beginning, insisted
on leading them. That is, she demanded that the armies join her,
and not the other way around.

By looking at Joan of Arc's own statements and the conditions of her
early life, however, we may surmise the reasons behind her adamant and
revolutionary participation in the Hundred Years War. As she would reluctantly
admit during the trials, one of the first mystical revelations during
her early teens informed her about the War (the italics are mine):

Before all things [the Angel] told me to be a good child and
that God would help me. And, among other things he told me to come to
the help of the King of France And the Angel told me of the grand
pitie [great misery] that was in the kingdom of France. (Pernoud 1964:
34)

Without discussing 'the Angel' for the time being, it can be noted that
Joan's understanding of the War occurred on a distinctly personal level
and was expressed within a private vision. In this context, it seems that
the reason behind the lay teenage girl's decision to go 'to the help of
the King of France' had something to do with a 'great misery'.

That Joan - or her voices - would choose such an emotive and dramatic
phrase in describing the War is telling. Joan had experienced the 'great
misery' first hand before approaching the Dauphin. At least twice the
marauding Anglo-Burgundian battalions had attacked Joan's village before
her departure. In the first instance, possibly around the time when she
began hearing her voices in1425, the villagers hired a nearby castle for
shelter and stayed there with their animals until the soldiers had passed
through. In the second assault, however, as W.S. Scott has noted, 'much
of the village [was] burned, and the church so badly damaged that it was
no longer usable' (Scott 1974: 23).
During this 1428 raid Joan and her family left Domremy before the soldiers'
arrival and took refuge in the town of Neufchateau for one to two weeks.
It was immediately after returning to the demolished village that Joan
left her family, once and for all, to go to 'the help of the King of France'.

In the light of the historical documents, Joan's description of the War
as a 'great misery' is most appropriate. For the peasantry in particular,
the periods of English occupation must have been horrific. As Kelly Devries
has noted, during the second and third phases of the War - late-fourteenth
and early-fifteenth centuries - the English armies adopted a new system
of warfare, which the French called chevachee (possibly derived
from cheval - horse). It comprised:

a quick cavalry raid through the countryside with the intention of pillaging
unfortified villages and towns, destroying crops and houses, stealing
livestock, and generally disturbing and terrorising the rural society.
(Devries 1999: 12)

This type of dirty warfare, devoid of the costs and numbers required
for besieging fortified cities or engaging the French armies in open-field
battles, proved extremely efficient for the English and their allies.
It struck France at the core of her medieval economy - agriculture - while
providing the invasion armies with victuals and valuables. In a missive
directed to the English troops in the 1420s, Sir John Fastolf, one of
the highest-ranking English knights in France, chillingly described the
methods and objectives of these raids:

[the English soldiers must march through the enemy territory] burning
and destroying all the lands as they pass, both houses, grain, vine, and
all the trees that bear fruit for man's sustenance, and all the cattle
that may not be driven, [are] to be destroyed And it seems verily
that by these ways and governance, the King [of England] shall conquer
his realm of France, and harm and destroy his enemies.
(Gies 1981: 19)

The chavachee was practiced 'with regularity and proficiency' (Devries
1999: 12) and with devastating consequences for England's enemies. In the
words of the contemporary Italian poet Petrarch, in France 'everywhere you
see the fatal footprints of the English and the hateful scars still bleeding
from their swords' (Tuchman 1979: 198). The widespread destruction - which
according to another contemporary source, left the fields '[f]rom Loire
to Seine, and from there to Somme' (Warner 1991: 4) empty and uncultivated
for the first half of the fifteenth century - was not limited to the obliteration
or looting of livestock, harvest and other material possessions. Its most
terrifying characteristic, perhaps, was an extraordinary, almost sadistic,
brutality towards French civilians. As Tuchman has observed, during the
raids the English soldiers

killed and tortured those who hid their goods or resisted ransom, not
sparing the clergy or the aged, violated virgins, nuns, and mothers, [and]
abducted women as enforced camp followers. (Tuchman 1979: 164)

While during the Hundred Years War, as Susan Brownmiller has observed,
the women of nobility were often treated respectfully, the lower class
women - particularly those of the peasant stock - were rarely spared violation
and enforced prostitution (Brownmiller
1975: 31). As Carolyn Nordstrom has noted, '[s]exual violence is a
mainstay of dirty war practice' (Nordstrom
1994: 9). Seeing as the English invasion of France during the Hundred
Years War was facilitated through an extensive application of some of
the dirtiest war practices in history, the magnitude and intensity of
the accompanying sexual violence probably verged on mass rape.

A number of contemporary sources make explicit references to this aspect
of the Hundred Years War. According to Nicholas Wright, the stories of
the capture and imprisonment of French women for sexual purposes are mentioned
so frequently in the records of the latter part of the Hundred Years War
that they become a 'bland formula' (Wright
1998: 73). One example is the Burgundian poet Pierre de Nesson's Lay
de Guerre (possibly written in 1429, the year that Joan of Arc appeared
on the political scene) in which an allegorical figure called 'War' proudly
states: '[T]here will be neither old or young woman who is not taken,
raped and dishonoured' (Wright 1998: 73). Wright has further observed:

Many soldiers admitted to "raping women and deflowering virgins",
to the "violation of women", to the "raping of married
and unmarried women" [A]lthough the details of these cases
are often obscure, the scale of the problem is clear enough. (Wright 1998:
73)

The raids and the widespread brutal treatment of female civilians by
the English soldiers were partly aimed at demoralising the French populace
into submission. But, as Frances Gies has observed, they functioned adversely
by inducing a strong hatred towards the invaders (Gies 1981: 19). 'It
was this aspect of war,' Gies has written 'that brought Joan of Arc onto
the stage' (19). This view can further be supported by the fact that the
watershed events of her early life - the beginning of the voices and her
departure for the Dauphin's court - correlated closely with the dates
of the violent English incursions into the isolated Meuse Valley.

I believe it was against this particular English 'weapon of war' - pillage
and rapine - that Joan of Arc unsheathed her sword, becoming, in Christine
McWebb's words, 'the defender of her sex' (McWebb
1996: 135). Although there is no evidence of Joan having been sexually
assaulted by the invaders until her imprisonment, there can be no doubt
about the young woman's fears and her acute awareness of the horrors that
had engulfed her sex and society. As Lucien Fabre has noted, the stories
of 'the violence offered to women [during Joan's life] could not be kept
from ears however chaste' (Fabre 1954:
25). I believe it was in reaction to the horrors of the English invasion
that Joan, appearing on the political stage, promised to 'raise such a
battle-cry as there has not been in France in a thousand years'
(Of Arc 2000: 29).

Joan of Arc's ears received not only the tales of the violated and dispossessed,
but also the voices that urged her to rally a disheartened prince and
his defeated armies against the aggressors. In her 22 March 1429 letter
sent to the English powers before the battles of Orleans she states:

King of England, and you, Duke of Bedford, who call yourself the Regent
of the Kingdom of France : Do justice to the King of Heaven; surrender
to the Maid the keys of all the good towns you have taken and violated
in France She is ready to make peace if you will do justice, relinquishing
France and paying for what you have withheld ; and if you do not
so, expect to hear the news of the Maid who will shortly come to see you,
to your very great damage. (Of Arc 2000: 28)

In these characteristically direct and assertive words, 'the Maid' describes
her mission as one of restoration rather than retaliation; but an anger
verging on hatred permeates the language. Although it is known that she
forbade her soldiers from killing or torturing English prisoners, there
can be no doubt about her own rage and ferocity towards her enemies. In
the same letter of summons Joan states:

King of England, if [you] do not [relinquish France], I am chief-of-war
and in whatever place I attain your people in France, I will make them
quit it willy nilly. And if they do not obey, I will have them all slain.
(Pernoud 1964: 82)

This declaration was not an empty threat but a sincere promise. And Joan
kept to it. Entire English battalions - about 3,000 soldiers - were put
to death during the battles of Orleans, and the English garrisons along
the Loire were completely eliminated during the 1429 campaign that culminated
in the battle of Patay. There, on 18 June, Joan's vanguard encountered
the retreating English main-body and the resulting situation was more
of a massacre than a battle; as the Dauphin's counsellor has reported,
the French lost three men in this combat. The English, on the other hand,
lost over 2,000 soldiers (Lucie-Smith 2000: 145).

The bloody victory at Patay, according to Regine Pernoud, 'more than
counterbalanced the disaster at Agincourt fourteen years earlier' (Pernoud
1996: 292). This battle, more than any other event of the Hundred
Years War, dealt a severe, incurable blow to the superiority of the English
longbow and resurrected the effectiveness of the armoured French cavalry.
It also accommodated the Dauphin's safe journey to the Cathedral of Rheims
where he regained and consolidated his title as Charles VII, King of France.
In very real historical terms, Joan's 'war-cry' paved the way for an end
to the English invasion. David Nicole has observed:

As a result of [Joan of Arc's victories] the morale of Charles VII and
his supporters rose accordingly. The loss of so many soldiers weakened
existing English garrisons while Charles's control over the Loire valley
was confirmed. The dream of a combined English and French realm had effectively
been destroyed. (Nicole 2001: 89)

Bringing about such a counterbalance and reversal was perhaps the Maid's
greatest passion. While calling Joan of Arc 'vengeful' would ignore her
recorded civility and compassion towards the English prisoners, it can
be seen that her actions were influenced by a ferocious desire for justice.
She was driven by a determination to hold the aggressors accountable and
to end their reign of rapine and pillage.

Her zeal was a response to the violation of women and the destruction
of her home. That a young laywoman should have seen herself as the instrument
of this justice was unusual, but is not surprising to us today. Joan belonged
to the gender and class that suffered most in the hands of the English.
It was natural that the fury, determination and courage to bring an end
to the suffering should emanate from the ranks of the War's foremost victims.
Joan was, as it were, the natural reaction to the English armies' terrifying
and loathsome actions.

Writing about the Maid

I too experienced a war. The Iran/Iraq War - sometimes referred to as
'the First Gulf War' - lasted for eight years during which a million lives
were lost. The War coincided with the first eight years of my schooling,
and two Iraqi missiles hit my school when I was in Grade 4. This happened
at night when the school was empty, so no one was killed. The janitor
was left shell-shocked, and unfortunately the next day I still had to
sit for a dreaded maths exam amidst the rubble. To my mother's disdain,
I hated maths and enjoyed nothing more than drawing pictures of knights
and gory battle-scenes. But, because of the Islamic ban on representational
arts, the only visual art taught in the Iranian schools was calligraphy
and my drawings, despite being popular with my classmates, were often
confiscated by the principal.

The chance to prove myself scholarly arrived, however, when in Grade
6 our Persian teacher told us to write an essay about a 'martyr'. Although
it was taken for granted that we would write a eulogy about a relative
or a neighbour killed by the Iraqis, I decided to go with my heart. I
managed to track down a second-hand translation of Maurice Maeterlinck's
Jeanne d'Arc in those streets of Tehran's university district.
I used it as the basis for my essay which, from memory, began with an
epistemological analysis of the Persian word for 'martyr'. 'Shahid,'
I wrote, 'comes from Shahadat (testimony), which means a martyr
is someone whose life and death are testimonies to their beliefs.' I then
said that no one I knew could serve as a better example of martyrdom than
Joan of Arc, before relating a short account of her life for the rest
of the essay.

As was the case in the Iranian schools, essays and other writing assignments
were presented orally in front of the class before being marked by the
teacher. I remember anticipating the possible punishment of being caned
for writing about 'an enemy' - a Western Christian woman - and later being
admonished by mum for provoking the authorities. When my name was called
out, I walked up and stood against the blackboard and read out the essay
without daring to look into the teacher's eyes. After the last words of
my reading, for a few seconds, a strange silence presided over the classroom.
Then the teacher said: 'You understand martyrdom. You really understand
it.' To my great surprise I was given the maximum mark, 20 out of
20, on the spot. That afternoon, at home, even Mum seemed impressed.

This unexpected success, perhaps more than any other event in my life,
placed me on the path of pursuing writing. I continued to read and write
profusely and received my first literary prize in 1990. The competition
was held as a tribute to Iran's best-known medieval epic poet, Ferdwosi
of Tus. I entered a modernised 'young adult' prose version of one of Shah
Numeh's episodes, 'Rustum and Sohrad'. The award made me something
of a celebrity as I was subsequently interviewed on national television.
I began entertaining thoughts of writing a modern version of Joan of Arc's
story. I was sure of my future as a writer, and the sky was the limit.

However, this was not to be. In 1991 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and
prompted an American attack on the Middle East. My parents decided that
enough was enough. They began visiting Western embassies in Tehran and,
quicker than I could look up Australia in the encyclopaedias, my father's
application for a visa to Australia was approved. Although I would have
preferred migrating to France - for Joan, but also for my other heroes,
Voltaire and Napoleon - the choice wasn't mine, and within months I was
struggling with the syllables of 'G'day' in the middle of the playground
of a Lismore high school. My difficulties with English and the alienation
that followed were, perhaps, my own fault. In Iran I had repeatedly refused
to learn the language of 'Joan of Arc's murderers' and had studied Basic
French instead. Now, at the age of fourteen, I was staring blankly at
the pages of the English school texts, realising that my chances of mastering
the language enough to become a writer in my new country were extremely
slim. Disheartened with the complications of English, I decided to swallow
my pride and abandon writing for the time being. To my mother's delight,
I topped my Grade 10 Maths class.

The worst was yet to come. A year after arriving in Australia we moved
to Brisbane. In Lismore the other students had generally avoided me, but
in the Brisbane state school I got my first taste of xenophobia. I tried
to ignore the bullies' name-callings, but there was nothing I could do
to impress the others and make friends with them. Their minds were already
made up about foreigners with darker skin and funny accents. I tried to
prove myself in the class by studying very hard, but the teachers (with
one exception) remained unimpressed if not contemptuous. In the playground,
seen as a 'camel fucker', 'terrorist', 'Muslim rapist' and the like, I
was usually a ready target for other students' frustrations. Unable to
defend myself against the overwhelming bullies, and too proud to discuss
the situation with my parents; I withdrew, decided to stop reading and
writing altogether, and enrolled for an engineering degree after finishing
high school.

I have written a fictionalised version of my experiences as a young newcomer
to Australia in Elixir: a story in poetry (Grendon Press, 2002,
[reviewed in this issue]). I have, perhaps,
in some minor ways transcended the traumas of alienation, or at least
assimilated into the 'Australian way of life' enough to be able to look
back and write about my experiences without too much anger. But I could
never shake off the loneliness that comes from being different from the
majority. And, despite all of that, I could not shake off the passion
for creativity either. After a year of yawning and doodling at the Circuits
and Measurements and Applied Chemistry classes I decided to save my sanity
by pursuing something more creative. At the expense of getting kicked
out of home I dropped out of Civil Engineering and enrolled in a Bachelor
of Creative Arts at Griffith University Gold Coast to study visual arts.
Even though my ambitions for writing had been thoroughly quashed, I still
fancied myself to be an artist.

But on the Gold Coast I met an extraordinary creature: a performance
poet. I watched him closely and realised that his medium allowed him a
direct, vocal expression of unabashed frustrations without the entrapments
of 'correct' English. As I started reading other poets my English began
to improve and, to my surprise, I received much better marks for my poems,
novellas and plays than I did for my paintings and attempts at installation-art.
My first poem was published in 1995 and I was offered a place in the university's
Honours program on finishing the BA. I felt less anxious then than I did
during high school because of having resuscitated my passion for writing.
But pursuing the writer's path in Australia has since greatly highlighted
my sense of Otherness and isolation. During my Honours year, for example,
I was the only student submitting a dissertation in poetry. As a newly-arrived
poet I have time and again found myself excluded from, and disappointed
by, publishers, literary journals and poetry circles. As a writer of any
kind, I have found myself alienated by Australian culture's prioritization
of visual communication over written language. I have, in short, found
myself at odds with other writers and excluded from the larger society.

On finishing my Honours degree I was offered a place in the postgraduate
program of Melbourne's Deakin University. I was asked to submit a proposal
for a project with a major creative writing component. The course coordinator
advised me to go to the State Library to prepare a proposal with bibliography.
In the tram I toyed with various possibilities: a narrative in verse about
a lonely Aboriginal warrior fighting the settlers; a magic realist horror
story about the evils of capitalist society; a reinterpretation of Voltaire's
Candide with a Muslim terrorist as its hero; a play about a police
watch-house haunted by the vengeful ghosts of suicidal inmates I
couldn't decide. Stepping off the tram and seeing the statue of Joan of
Arc outside the State Library in Swanston Street, however, reminded me
that my topic had long been chosen.

The Voices

I was surprised that I hadn't thought about her already. Joan of Arc,
apart from having been one of my earliest and most formative influences,
had also been one of history's best-known outcasts. As Anne Llewellyn
Barstow has put it:

Both by the solitary nature of her visionary experience
and by the ecclesiastical condemnation, Joan was an outsider. (Barstow
1986: xvii)

The condemnation fatally expelled Joan of Arc from her society, cutting
her off from the branches of the Mother Church and extinguishing her in
the flames of the punitive bonfire in a macabre public spectacle at Rouen's
Old Market Square. But Joan had long been a solitary outcast prior to
her life's horrible end. She does not seem to have ever established an
interpersonal relationship despite having had a huge number of fanatical
supporters and loyal warriors, before being captured. Not only did her
fail-safe virginity prevent romantic relationships, but she also actively
repelled other women's friendships. In September 1429, for example, an
obviously star-struck soothsayer, called Catherine de la Rochelle, approached
Joan, offering to help with raising the funds for a further campaign against
the Burgundians after the aborted attack on Paris. This woman then disclosed
her secrets by telling the Maid about the 'white lady' who visited her
at nights. Joan recalled the encounter during her trial:

I told Catherine that she should return to her husband, look after her
home, and bring up her children. (Barstow 1986: 65)

Although Joan of Arc's characteristic arrogance and rudeness cannot be
denied, her lack of interest and/or inability to engage in interpersonal
relationships seems to have stemmed from what Barstow has described as
'the awful loneliness of the mystic' (43). According to Joan's own words,
she stopped participating in village dances and other social activities,
which she had dismissively refer to as 'games and frolics' (Of Arc 2000:
11) upon hearing her voices for the first time at the age of 13. She did
not speak to anyone - her family included - about this intense private
experience before secretly departing for war four years later (11).

In the meantime, according to the testimonies of those who knew Joan
during her adolescence in Domremy, she busied herself with housework and
farm duties, and spent a seemingly unusual amount of time at the village
church of Saint Remy and at the nearby hermitage of Notre Dame de Bermont.
Hauviette, a Domremy woman who claimed to have known Joan very well, remembered
her famous girlhood friend:

[Joan] went often and of her own will to church and the sacred places
and often she was ashamed because of people remarking how she went so
devoutly to church. I have heard the priest who was there in her time
say that she went so devoutly to church. (Pernoud 1964: 18)

Her anti-social behaviour and extreme piety - or what was perceived by
the others as piety - distanced Joan from the youth of the close-knit
farming community and aroused suspicion and hostility. One of the villagers,
Isabelette d'Epinal, for example, would later recall: '[Joan] did not
dance, so that we, the other girls and young men, even talked about it'
(Pernoud 1964: 19). Another villager, Colin, would also remember: '[Joan]
was very devout towards God and the Blessed Virgin, so much so that I
myself, who was young then, and other young men teased her' (18). From
these statements it seems that, as Barstow has noted, Joan 'traded the
usual social life of a village girl for religious experience' (Barstow
1986: 54).

Labelling Joan of Arc's solitary interactions and conversations with
her voices as 'spiritual' or 'religious experience', as Barstow does,
is misleading. Indeed, it was the representatives of the Church
who eventually condemned her to death by fire, but her professional behaviour,
her politics and public statements - as we know them now - were rarely
aimed at spiritual matters. This observation, I believe, needs further
emphasis if we are to investigate the 'reality' of her voices.

As mentioned before, Joan of Arc's masculine outfit was sacrilegious.
Leading men into battle and waging war were further repudiations of the
'womanly modesty' praised by the Church. In the context of the Great Schism,
her fealty towards the pro-Avignon Valois Dynasty was seen as a possible
opposition to the Pope in Rome. And introducing herself publicly as the
messenger of 'the King of Heaven' gave way to charges of Presumption and
Idolatry. Her later canonisation and sainthood in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were totally Modern political events, concocted
by the Vatican and the French Extreme Right to, in Warner's view, 'make
a firm stand against the rapid secularisation of France and the spread
of unbelief [i.e. Socialism] in the Christian world in general' (Warner
1991: 264). I believe, however, that seeing Joan of Arc's voices as saintly
religious signifiers is not only a right-wing invention but also, more
importantly, a simplification of history. I also believe that her other
spiritualised depictions - as shaman, witch, etc - are latter-day mystifications
that have resulted from ignoring Joan's own objectives and her objective
reality.

Joan of Arc was, first and foremost, a military leader. Despite her piety,
the visions of 'the angel', the voices, her supposedly devotional virginity,
her prophecies and the like, she never performed publicly as anything
other that the chief-of-war of the Dauphin's armies in 1429 and, later,
as an anti-Burgundian renegade leader - until the time of her capture
during a battle outside the town of Compiegne. When, during the Poitiers
examinations, Brother Seguin Seguin of the Order of Preaching Friars asked
her to show him and other monks a sign of being the messenger of 'the
King of Heaven', she retorted angrily:

In God's name, I am not come here to Poitiers to make signs; but take
me to Orleans [i.e. let me fight the English at Orleans] and I will show
you the signs for which I've been sent. (Pernoud 1964: 64)

In other words, Joan did not see herself as a miracle worker, magician
or saint, but as a soldier whose abilities could not be demonstrated by
performing audiovisual tricks (miracles). She would prove herself only
through winning military combats. In the context of her era, if Joan had
fancied herself to be as much a spiritual figure as many others wanted
her to be, she would have surely settled for life in an Order, in a convent,
as an itinerant fortune-teller or even as an evangelist preacher arousing
a crusade against the infidels and heretics. But she was a knight who
devoted her life to the very historical and secular task of overturning
the tide of the Hundred Years War. Her divine message, as seen at the
beginning of this chapter, was to promise the Dauphin the French throne;
it had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the Church, converting
Jews and Muslims into Christianity, admonishing the sins of her society,
preaching about the Apocalypse, etc. Her spirituality was never for the
sake of spirituality, but aimed squarely at ending the English invasion.
As Sullivan has also noted:

Joan did not merely claim to have had mystical experiences as many Medieval
women claimed to have had: she claimed to have been sent by God to accomplish
a particular goal, such as the relief of the siege of Orleans, the coronation
of her king at Rheims, or the expulsion of the English from France.
(Sullivan 1996: 93)

That Joan of Arc was spiritually active cannot be denied; that her voices
play a crucial part in her story is beyond argument, even if only because,
as Gies has observed, the voices 'conferred on [her] a strength of resolution
possessed by few, women or men' (Gies 1981: 28). But seeing these voices
as supernatural or religious is unnecessary because Joan herself never
believed her mission to be either magical or religious. Furthermore, seeing
the voices as those of specific Catholic saints or characters of Christian
iconography - i.e. Archangel Michael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria and
Saint Margaret of Antioch - has been based on seemingly naïve readings
of the trials transcripts. I agree with Sullivan's contention that 'Joan
did not experience her voices as [the aforementioned saints] but was merely
forced to claim to do so by the pressure of the trial' (Sullivan 1996:
102).

But, if Joan of Arc's voices aren't to be seen as religious, then how
are they to be understood? Was she 'mentally ill'? Or is it possible,
after all, that faced with the scepticism of a hostile ecclesiastical
judiciary, she lied and invented the story of her voices to save her life?
I shall answer these questions in the reverse order.

Firstly, although I believe that the supposed identities of the voices
were fabricated during the trial and that a number of exaggerated accounts
of their attributes were manufactured in defence against the questions
put to her, Joan of Arc could not have lied about the actual existence
of the voices, which she preferred referring to as her 'counsel'. Her
severe detachment from her community during adolescence and the level
of her attachment to solitude and praying from that age onward indicate
the kind of loneliness that produces self-referential voicing of good
advice. Thus, for example, Joan was telling the truth when she said that
her counsel first began speaking to her when she was thirteen and that
it told her 'to go often to church' (Of Arc 2000: 6).

Furthermore, I believe that there is a definite realism in Joan's description
of her conversations with these voices regardless of their identities
and attributes. At times, for example, she seems to have been genuinely
baffled and even intimidated by their commands. Upon being told to go
to the Dauphin and fight the English, for example, Joan had initially
rejected her counsel's demand, claiming that she was 'a poor girl who
knew nothing of riding and warfare' (Of Arc 2000: 7). Her further arguments
and disagreement with the voices are also the characteristics of an authentic
relationship. In the case of her attempted escape from prison, for example,
she decided to jump out the window even though, in her words, 'my voices
forbade me to jump. And at last, for fear of the English, I did jump and
I was hurt' (Of Arc 2000: 88).

Whether Joan of Arc heard the counsel in her mind's ear imaginatively
or in her body's ears physically might be pedantic for historical purposes,
but it does evoke the sensational issue of her questioned sanity and the
assumptions of schizophrenia, epilepsy, etc. As Linda H. Conner has written
of Michel Foucault's hypothesis, madness during the Middle Ages was 'a
means of access to higher knowledge not available to other mortals' (Conner
1982: 786). Was Joan of Arc mad?

According to the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology there is a marked
difference between hypnotic perceptions that 'accompany vivid religious
experiences' and the auditory hallucinations that are seen 'as a hallmark
of various disorders such as schizophrenia' (Reber
and Reber 2001: 313). Joan of Arc's voices clearly belong to the first
category even though here, as before, I would contest the use of the word
'religious'.

While I basically agree with Will Durant that possibly at the time of
first hearing her voices 'some physiological changes mystified [Joan]
at [a] most impressionable age'(Durant 1957: 82) I believe that
calling Joan of Arc mentally disordered is unnecessary and inappropriate.
As George Bernard Shaw has noted, Joan was not insane but, if anything,
'unusually sane' (Shaw 1953: 18).
He went as far as saying that Joan was 'mentally excessive' instead of
'mentally defective' (19). Her extraordinary talents in warfare and military
leadership; her ability to argue coherently against judges and scholars;
and her personal qualities such as an incredible power to persuade people,
maintain composure in the face of fatal danger and her proto-feminist
self-reliance could be seen as testimonies to her remarkable, even excessive,
sanity.

My Epic Response

If Joan was neither saint nor schizophrenic; if her voices were neither
those of Catholic icons nor symptoms of a mental illness; what on earth
were they? In what context and with what words could we unravel one of
history's most persistent mysteries?

My answer to this question, as proposed in La Pucelle (the creative
component of my PhD candidature), has been an expansion of the very first
testimony of Joan of Arc cited in this paper; the one made to the monks
present at her cell on the morning of her execution. Here, I believe,
she discloses the identity of the angel whose voice transformed her from
a war-stricken farmer's daughter into one of Medieval Europe's most successful
military leaders:

I was the angel and there was no other. (Of Arc 2000: 143)

During the course of my creative writing I used this sentence as what
Michael Riffaterre may call a matrix, 'a minimal and literal sentence';
and as Riffaterre would further have it, my entire epic, the representation
of a specific assemblage of history, has been produced through exhausting
all the possible paradigms of this matrix (Riffaterre
1978: 19). In the light of this literary exercise, I have come to
believe that Joan was mistaken to have believed her voices were supernatural
and sent by God, 'the King of Heaven'. The voices, in my epic at least,
come from her own natural self or ego; from her own survival instincts
expanding into a fierce desire for rising above the tragedies of her age,
gender and class.

I believe that the angel was Joan herself, guiding her towards a path
of personal victory. That this personal quest correlated with an historical
movement is fascinating but by no means an abnormality. That she heard
these voices so clearly, and listened to them so devotionally, is extraordinary;
but neither saintly nor deranged. She believed in the messages of her
soul's voices; they told her of the great horrors of her world, and about
the ways of the hero who could forestall the terrors of war, pillage and
rapine.

Joan of Arc, I believe, was a revolutionary leader whose tragic end is
a further affirmation of the fundamentality of the causes she championed.
In today's terminology, she fought for equality: a personal as well as
a public quest. That is, an end to being an inferior. A French country
girl during the Hundred Years War, I believe, was the lowest of humans.
Joan fought hard to reverse the tides of oppression by becoming a victorious
knight who redeemed femininity, Frenchness and peasantry after almost
a hundred years of humiliation and violation. And her personal desires
- manifested through the voices - became historic; her victories resurrected
the Valois Dynasty and subsequently the English armies were, once and
for all, expelled from France.

In the end, I can't claim that that this version of Joan of Arc is anything
other than my own epic poet's subjective perspective expounded in the
creative component of my PhD candidature. But the documents and records
of Joan of Arc's story have strongly shaped my subjective and artistic
perceptions. My epic is nothing but an extension of Joan of Arc's history.
This is not to say that La Pucelle is an historically accurate
depiction of the Maid's history - although it is, to my mind, very much
so. But because I have felt and absorbed the dominant themes of her story
on a very personal level, I can confidently say that there exists a strong
connection between myself as an author and the subject matter of the text
that I have produced. Whether this connection has resulted in 'good' or
'bad' writing is not for me to say, but I do hope that it has done justice
to Joan of Arc's incredible story.

References

Aberth, John. From the Brink of the Apocalypse.
New York: Routledge, 2001.

McWebb, Christine. 'Joan of Arc and
Christine de Pisan: The Symbiosis of Two Warriors in the Ditie de Jehanne
d'Arc'. In Wheeler, Bonnie and Wood, Charles T. (eds.). Fresh Verdicts
on Joan of Arc. New York: Garland, 1996. Return to
article

Meltzer, Francoise. For Fear of the Fire: Joan of
Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2001. Return to article

Sullivan, Karen. 'I do not name to
you the voice of St. Michael: the Identities of Joan of Arc's Voices'.
In Wheeler, Bonnie and Wood, Charles T. (eds.). Fresh Verdicts on Joan
of Arc. New York: Garland, 1996. Return to article

Sullivan, Karen. The Interrogation
of Joan of Arc. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Return to article